In the 1970s Ishiuchi Miyako shocked Japan's male-dominated photography establishment with Yokosuka Story, a gritty, deeply personal project about the city where she spent her childhood and where the United States established a naval base in 1945. Working prodigiously ever since, Ishiuchi has consistently fused the personal and political in her photographs, interweaving her own identity with the complex history of postwar Japan that emerged from the shadows cast by American occupation. Miyako Ishiuchi's photobook Apartment doesn't describe a sad scene of isolation so much as lament the vanishing communal life of the Tokyo apartments that were rapidly disappearing in the 1970s, replaced by new apartment blocks that improved living standards but also rendered obsolete the permeable walls of the buildings she photographed.Rather than portraying specific rooms, Ishiuchi's photographs are meant to express a rough texture, to communicate the feeling of the world in which she lives. The grainy finish of these images has its own charm, suggesting the sensation of coming into contact with one's own universe